Gram painted some wild faces recently at a birthday party. Caleb wanted his face to be camouflage, but I didn't have brown and no time to mix colors! :-( He decided he didn't care, he still wanted a camo face, so he chose blue for the additional color. Thomas wanted batman, which I quite enjoyed doing!
I've always wanted to try my hand at mosaics. Mazie's little nook area adjacent to her mom and dad's room provided an opportunity. Melissa wanted Mazie's name on the wall but couldn't decide how to accomplish it. That is, until I had a light bulb moment.
"How about I do her name in mosaic?"
Melissa stared at me. "Mom," she groaned, "Do you even know how to do mosaic? I mean, I want something in here now. I want to get this area finished!"
"No, I've never done it, but I've wanted to. It will give me an opportunity to see if I like doing mosaics. It's settled. I'm doing Mazie's name in mosaic."
Miranda, (Melissa's sister, and my ever-so-confident-in-her-mom daughter) laughed, "Whatever! You will never get it done."
Two weekends later I was able to dish those skeptical words up on a spoon and feed them back to my doubting daughter. I walked into the office on a Monday morning, finished piece in hand, and held it up for Miranda to see. She looked up from her yahoo, facebook, myspace bookkeeping and began choking. I ran over and patted her back.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I just choked on something," she said as she cleared her throat.
"Oh, my gosh, mom!" she exclaimed, "You did it! It's so pretty! Melissa's going to LOVE it!"
And, Melissa did.
What I learned from this project:
1. I love doing mosaics!
2. Even though it is messier than 10 four-year olds in a room full of paint.
3. I need a new home so I can have a mosaic area. (Talking to husband about this tiny little problem).
4. Dishes are hard to break (I used dishes on the pink and brown areas) but it is a lot of fun taking a hammer to perfectly good dishes and ruining them to create something totally unique.
5. I should have used a darker green color for the leaves on the flowers (which are hard to tell they are flowers) but I'm not being too critical since this was my first attempt at mosaics.
6. The little hearts were worth looking for (found them at MJ Design) in the mosaic area.
7. Though you can't see in the picture: the little rocks that are scattered on the image have word impressions: trust, joy, peace, love, happy. I found these at MJ Design as well and they added a lot to the finished piece.
8. Ask my son to make the platform/frame for any new designs that I intend to hang. (He would've done a much better base/frame for my project).
9. Do more mosaics!
10. Just to impress my daughter.
